A recent porting effort was undertaken by a team of developers beginning in 2009, and after more than two years of effort, eventually abandoned. You're more than welcome to restart development on your own if you wish.

Active port development is done by a limited number of people, in their spare time. These people usually make new ports only for software they use directly or are interested in.

You can help. Consider creating your own port. There is some documentation available on this: the OpenBSD Porter's Handbook. Read it, and read it again. Especially the part about maintaining your port. Then try making a new port, and test it carefully and step by step. If finally it works OK for you, submit it to the ports mailing list at ports@openbsd.org. Chances are good you will get some feedback and testing from other people. If the testing is successful, your port will be considered to be taken up in the ports tree.

To clarify, the development I mentioned above was for Wine 1.1. Prior to that, the most recent working Wine port was version 99025, which I understand could emulate a subset of APIs used in Win 3.1, Win95, and WinNT. Details about the development effort, now that I have reviewed the ports@ mailing list archive, indicate that additionally, a 1.0 port was in development in 2008.

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Occasionally, a fan of virtualbox will ask on ports@ if there is any development work ongoing. Looking through the mailing list archive, it appears that there is little interest by the ports@ community as there is a virtualbox design flaw which eliminates its use for OpenBSD on platforms without VT-x hardware. See the last post in the most recent thread: http://marc.info/?t=126278204200002&r=1&w=2

I suspect the reason is more along the lines that you're introducing another layer of complexity, which can in turn introduce more security exploits.

Theo posted this regarding Xen:

Quote:

x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full
kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which
barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating
system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit.

You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a
worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating
systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around
and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

You've seen something on the shelf, and it has all sorts of pretty
colours, and you've bought it.

That's all x86 virtualization is.

I think it's safe to say that OpenBSD won't ever have virtualization support.

I think it's safe to say that OpenBSD won't ever have virtualization support.

Sounds like a safe bet to me too.

More generally though, Theo's very argument would also lead one to conclude not to develop operating systems and their applications. Yet he continues to develop OpenBSD. I applaud the effort to improve security, but at the same time recognize that if that was humanity's only priority we'd all still be huddled up in little caves with our heads stuck in the sand. We've made some progress by taking risks and doing imperfect things too.

Full disclosure: I'm not a big fan of virtualization, but do use DOSemu a bit.